Agnes Macphail - First Canadian woman elected to the House of Commons. Photo Credit: Wikipedia

In a recent CBC online article Audrey McLaughlin, former leader of the NDP, mused that Canadians may not be ready to be led by a woman. The article itself received little attention from readers, drawing only 24 comments and no play in the print or television media. The article and the muted response to it raise a number of interesting questions. Do people see another article about women and inequality and just tune out? Do they feel that the playing field has been leveled and there are no longer barriers to women’s equal participation in Canadian society? Is it true that Canadians are not prepared to be led by a woman?

Although women make up more than 50% of Canada’s population, they hold only 22% of the seats in the House of Commons. According to the United Nations the benchmark number for a “critical mass” of elected females is 30%. It has been less than a century since Canadian women were given the right to vote and run for elected office. In the first election for which they were eligible to run, held in 1921, four women ran as candidates and one, Agnes Macphail, was elected. Figure 1 below shows our progress from 1921 to 2008. Between 1921 and 1979, the number of women elected held steady at fewer than ten per election. The mid to late seventies marked the beginning of a significant growth trend: the number of women elected climbed to 62 by 1997. The less encouraging part of the graph is between 1997 and 2008, which shows a definite flattening of the strong growth experienced in preceding decades.

Canadians like to imagine themselves as an enlightened and progressive people – one that values women’s perspectives, rights and equality. If this is the case why are we not electing more female Parliamentarians (both members and leaders)? Worldwide, we are behind the times, ranking 45th internationally when it comes to the number of women in the lower house of parliament. The list of countries who have felt themselves ready to go as far as electing a female leader is extensive and includes Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Latvia, Finland, The Philippines, Bangladesh, Mozambique, Germany, Liberia, Chile, Jamaica and Switzerland. People might be surprised to learn that Rwanda was actually the first country in the world to elect more female members of Parliament than male.

Statistics can be a dangerous beast, though, and a look behind the numbers reveals that the problem may not be as cut and dried as Ms. McLaughlin suggests. Women in Parliament, written by Julie Cool notes that studies have shown there are three obstacles that a woman must overcome to be elected to Parliament:

1) Women must themselves be interested in running
2) Of the interested women, some must be selected by parties as candidates
3) Once selected as candidates, they must be elected by the voters

It turns out that of these three factors it is the first – that women are simply not lining up to enter politics – that appears to be the main problem. Figure 2 would seem to support this assertion, showing that growth in the number of female candidates has also stagnated in the last decade.

Before reading Cool’s report, I had brainstormed what I thought might be holding women back from entering politics. My personal list was:

1) Women still carry a disproportionate share of household and family responsibilities when compared to men and simply do not have the time for politics.
2) Women typically have less access to the financial capital and networking opportunities required to mount an election campaign.
3) Women do not like the combative way in which politics is often practiced in Canada.

It turns out that these are largely the same factors identified in Cool’s report. In addition, women tend to be under-represented in the higher echelons of the professions that are seen as natural stepping stones to political office (e.g. law, business). Cool also identifies some systemic problems that tend to suppress women’s participation, such as the “first-past-the-post” electoral system, in which women are traditionally under-represented. Largely though, it is women themselves who are opting out of the political process at a very grassroots level.

In spite of Ms. MacLaughlin’s assertion, it does not appear fair to place the blame on voters. When women do run for election their success rate is almost the same as men – 17% vs. 19%. The fact remains, however, that women are severely under-represented at all levels of Canadian politics. It is not sexist to recognize that women often have different perspectives on a great many topics than men. Indeed, the comedy industry would collapse overnight if suddenly women and men saw the world in the same way. Women make up greater than half of the population of this country and their under-representation in the political sphere should not be seen as a merely a “women’s issue” – it should be seen as a national embarrassment.

So what is a progressive nation such as ours to do? In her report, Ms. Cool identified several things that have been proposed to increase women’s participation in politics:

1) Changing from a “first-past-the-post” electoral system to proportional representation.
2) Quotas, either mandatory or voluntary.
3) Limits on spending for both nomination and election campaigns.
4) Education and mentoring opportunities to increase women’s interest in political office.
5) Making politics more woman and family-friendly.

Some of these are much more easily accomplished than others, and it seems to me that the most difficult of the five is going to be making politics more friendly to women and families. The first four are mainly structural changes, but item five requires both a structural changes and an emotional shift. Now, I am not the warmest and fuzziest of people, but of my own reasons for not running for political office, the highly adversarial and sometimes insulting atmosphere at all political levels is a heavy disincentive to get involved. Not only do I not wish to subject myself to it, but I do not wish it for my family. I enjoy a vigorous debate as much as the next person (sometimes more, if you ask the innocent bystanders), but there is a vast difference between respectful debate and full frontal assault mud-slinging. There are those who will bluster on with the old “if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen” attitude, but they need to ask themselves if the current system is getting the results that Canadians deserve. At the moment, our government is absolutely not representative of those it governs, and that does an enormous disservice to both men and women.

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Tags: canadian politics, women

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Our Country. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.